


foregone conclusions

by trench



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: But also, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Reveal, Ladrien | Adrien Agreste/Marinette Dupain-Cheng as Ladybug, Ladynoir | Adrien Agreste as Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng as Ladybug, Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug Knows Adrien Agreste Is Chat Noir, Sort Of, just a lot of talking, tagging is harder than writing the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:41:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28464027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trench/pseuds/trench
Summary: Adrien Agreste holds his hand in front of his face, squinting up at her. “Ladybug?”“Ad—um—citizen?” Good save, totally not suspicious. It’s not as if she’s met him in the suit on several memorable occasions.“Hi,” he breathes.“What are you doing here!”He’s sitting in one of the garden’s metal chairs. By himself. At night. In the pitch black dark.“Just enjoying the park,” he says. “What about you?”“Well.” She stares at him. “Yeah. Me too.”
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Comments: 5
Kudos: 109





	foregone conclusions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jamari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamari/gifts).



> alternate summary: Ladybug suspects. Adrien simps.
> 
> I'm your secret santa Jamari! You wanted ladrien or ladynoir and I tried to give you both. You've been so nice to me in the short time we've known each other and your art is AMAZING, I hope you enjoy!
> 
> thank you, thank you, thank you to [StrangeRahne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangerahne) for the wonderful and thoughtful last minute beta

Ladybug swings her legs, glancing up at the clock on the d’Orsay. Should be any minute now. She really hopes they don’t run too late; Great British Bake Off started at nine and if she misses the end her dad will spoil star baker for sure. And it’s the bread episode, her favorite. A little shiver of longing runs through her, and her black-spotted foot catches on a gargoyle and knocks off one pointed ear. She winces. “Don’t worry, I’m magic,” she tells it, patting its stone head.

“Foolish child,” yelps Mr. Pigeon. “My flock will fill the skies of Paris forevermore!”

Ah, there they are.

Mr. Pigeon’s unmistakable screeches echo down the alley to her left as his birds wheel around him. Ladybug levers herself up and cracks her back. Ooh, that was a good one. 

“Dunno about that,” Chat calls, leaping behind the swarm of birds carrying Mr. Pigeon. He springs back and forth between the buildings, herding the whole mess toward her. “Won’t you have to take a bathroom break sooner or later?”

They burst into the plaza in front of the museum. Ladybug’s ready, yo yo a blur at her side, stance wide and strong. 

“Took you long enough,” she shouts to Chat.

“You’re not the one covered in feathers, my lady,” he says, clicking his baton away. True to form, he sneezes immediately. 

“Total domination is within my grasp!” booms Mr. Pigeon. 

Ladybug huffs. “You know how this ends,” she says. “Lay down your whistle and go back to your normal life, Mr. Ramier.” Her speech is only a little dampened by the huge yawn she lets out halfway through. 

“Never!” cries Mr. Pigeon. “I am lord of the skies, I am invincible—” 

Ladybug whips her yo yo straight through the flock, sending the birds weaving in confusion. For the fourth time that month, Chat neatly swipes Mr. Pigeon’s whistle and cracks it under his boot heel. They’ve gotten so much practice dealing with him that neither of them even has to call their power any more. Mr. Pigeon barely has time to cackle maniacally before they round him up and set things to rights.

She cleanses the akuma while Chat, still sneezing, leads Mr. Ramier away. “You know, maybe you should consider talking to someone,” she hears Chat say as they round the corner. “Many people find therapy very helpful …”

Ladybug sighs and lets herself slump for a moment. She and Chat can’t figure out why Mr. Ramier keeps getting akumatized, and she’s exhausted from dropping everything to fix him so often. She can see it in Chat, too. His eyes duller, his mouth slower to smile. It’s taking a toll on them both and they’re no closer to finding Hawkmoth. 

She texts Chat that she’s dead on her feet and heading home. Without using her lucky charm, she doesn’t have to detransform right away, and Ladybug kind of wants to take the long way just to mope a bit. The pools of lamplight wash her in orange as she crosses the bridge. She wishes she had Chat’s cataclysm to blink them out. Paris doesn’t deserve to look so cheerful when her head feels like a thundercloud. 

On the other side of the river, the Jardin is empty and full of moody shadows, perfect for some melancholic brooding. The dark seeps over her until the world is a mass of faint shapes. She drags her feet, kicking the gravel. Her stupid magic suit doesn’t even scuff. She just wants something to stay, to _show_ —her charm vanishes damage like it never happened, but the aftermath doesn’t go away so easily for Marinette. She has to bear the weight. Her and Chat. 

Her leg clangs on metal. Somebody shrieks. Ladybug’s yo yo is in her hand before she consciously thinks to reach for it, and she flicks it open to shine bright light. _Please, not another akuma already, I’m too tired for another one_ —

Adrien Agreste holds his hand in front of his face, squinting up at her. “Ladybug?”

“Ad—um—citizen?” Good save, totally not suspicious. It’s not as if she’s met him in the suit on several memorable occasions.

“Hi,” he breathes.

“What are you doing here!”

He’s sitting in one of the garden’s metal chairs. By himself. At night. In the pitch black dark.

“Just enjoying the park,” he says. “What about you?”

“Well.” She stares at him. “Yeah. Me too.”

He shades his eyes. “Could you turn that off?”

“Oh! Sorry.” She clicks her yo yo shut. Everything goes black again, but she keeps looking where she last saw his face, heart hammering harder than it ever did during the “battle” with Mr. Pigeon.

“Rough night, huh?” he says. “I heard the squawking.”

She sighs. “Yeah. I’m starting to think Mr. Pigeon is going to haunt us forever.”

“He’s already been akumatized, what, three times this month?”

“Four,” she corrects. “And poor Mr. Ramier can’t even hold down a job, can’t find a lease. He’s just cycling in all this anger, never getting better.”

“That’s awful,” Adrien says. “Being stuck like that.”

“Don’t need to tell me,” she says, feeling every twinge and cramp in her body, the headache gaining steam behind her eyes, the fog that never seems to lift from her thoughts. “I’m the one up all night dealing with it.” She immediately wishes she could take it back when it lands with all the grace of a bitter brick between them.

Adrien’s shape is resolving in the gloom, his shoulders, his hair. He leans forward. “Are you—”

She steps back and laughs, nervous. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, it’s okay!”

“It’s my duty to protect Paris, and an honor to serve as Ladybug, of course.” True, and bullshit.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be tired sometimes, right?”

“I really can’t be,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “I have to be focused. People are counting on me. Actually, I’d better go. It’s late.”

“Or you could stay,” he says. She jumps when he touches her wrist. “I mean, if you want to. Just for a bit. I could use some company.”

She glances back at the d’Orsay clock. She can’t make it out, but it must be past ten. The sun set hours ago. _Bread episode_ , she thinks.

“We don’t even have to talk,” he says. “I...I just don’t want to be alone right now.”

She bites her lip. It’s a bad idea. Any familiarity at all with regular people while she’s Ladybug is dangerous, let alone someone she actually knows. And seeing Adrien here, now, it settles among the collection of half-noticed coincidences piling up in the back of her head that she tries not to obsess over and blares like a siren. She knows better than to borrow trouble by poking holes in her own insistence on keeping secrets.

But. All of a sudden, she doesn’t want to be alone either.

She stumbles in the dark until she knocks into another chair—her knees are going to look like hell tomorrow—and drags it over across from his.

“Thanks,” Adrien says softly. She can see his outline but not his face and resists the urge to shine a light at him again. She’s stared at him enough she should be able to imagine every expression he could possibly make. And some impossible ones, too. Some that she’s only seen on another boy’s face. 

“Just so you know, I’m probably not going to be very good company,” she warns.

“I don’t believe that, but I like bad company anyway.”

“Bad? Hey!”

He laughs. “Okay, excellent and esteemed company on an off day.”

“Maybe I’m just neutral. Ever thought of that?”

“Hmm. Definitely not. You make an impression.”

Her stomach jumps. What does that mean? “Oh, you’re the expert now?”

“I think I am.” His chair creaks, his voice lilts teasingly. “You’re pretty easy to read.”

She has to laugh. Adrien, yearslong object of her straining affections, unaware he’s even a target. Adrien, supposedly trapped by a dinnertime curfew, sitting in the park minutes after the akuma attack, adding another brick in the wall of her growing suspicions. And _she’s_ the transparent one?

“So how do I feel?” she asks.

“Like shit. But you don’t want to say so.”

What would it hurt to be honest? She trusts him to protect her privacy. Opening up is not a burden if he’s already guessed. “Yeah. I can’t keep my eyes open, I’m achy all the time, and something else is always about to go wrong.”

“You never said.” He sounds almost hurt. As if he really cares. That’s not fair, she knows he’d care even if her curiosities about his propensity for leather are wrong. She knows he’d have the same worries for any of his friends. But this concern is for her, and that sends warmth flushing through her. God, he’s so _good_ , she can’t stand it.

Still, it’s a little prickly, overwhelming, to be telling him these things she doesn’t talk about like she didn’t stare at the back of his head for several hours earlier in the day. She plays dumb. “Never said?”

“To, um, the press. You don’t talk about that in interviews.” Fairly weak excuse, she catalogues.

“What, I don’t complain about the sleep deprivation and school delinquency warnings and anxiety? Because it would be so helpful if I told everyone I can barely keep up anymore.” 

“It would be. You should.” She thinks he’s frowning. “Or you could talk to, you know. Chat Noir.”

She chews her lip, watching him. “I could talk to Chat Noir,” she repeats. Knowing she might be taunting him a little and failing to feel guilty about it, she makes to get up. “Maybe I’ll go find him. He must be close by.”

Adrien springs up, waving his hands. “I didn’t mean right this second! Just the next time you see him.” 

“Pretty soon, I bet,” she says evenly.

“I wouldn’t know.” His voice goes sly. “And what, you’d just abandon me?”

“I’d never abandon a citizen of Paris,” she says loftily.

“No, you’d just drive one crazy.”

“What?”

“What? Nothing.”

“Uh huh.”

In the silence she looks out at the dark. It used to scare her when she was a kid, imagining all the terrifying and fantastical things lurking there, waiting to snatch her from the safety of the light. She grew out of it. But once again she’s right back there, fearing monsters in the dark, and this time she knows they’re real. Akuma, yes, but also expectations, responsibility, change. She turns to Adrien, still just a different shade of dark to her eyes. Something else she’s feared for a long time, even mixed in with the lurching hope and giddy infatuation of her crush. It scares her that her emotions coast so dramatically with every overanalyzed signal from him, like she’s just a track with no choice in the train running her down. It scares her to like him so much. And it terrifies her that he might like her back.

He touches her knee and her stomach tightens into a hot squirmy knot.

“What are you thinking about?”

He’s definitely not getting the truth on that one. “My feet hurt,” she blurts. A smaller, less disastrous truth.

“I’ll rub your feet.”

She squawks and tucks her legs up under her in a flash, a shiver zinging up her spine. 

“Can I?”

She’s red as hell whether or not he can see. Screw it. “I. Guess so.”

His chair scoots closer over the gravel.

“Can I, uh. Have your foot?”

“Oh!” 

She unfolds her legs and straightens one out. Her ankle bumps his leg before he catches it in his hand. She sits rigidly in her chair, hands clamped on the metal arms, as he pulls her foot into his lap. Chills spill across her skin and her heart beats loud in her ears. His grip is very light. She musters all her self control to fight down a shudder, mortified at the idea of him noticing it. Is she determined to send herself into hysterics tonight? Throw caution to the gale-force wind?

Adrien rolls his thumbs into her arch, pushing gently at her instep. Ladybug melts into her chair with a groan. 

Never mind. She fully endorses every past decision leading to this moment.

“So let’s hear it,” he says. “Air your grievances.”

“That’s pretty much all of them,” says the puddle formerly known as Ladybug. It’s not fair to expect her to string intelligible words together. Her cognitive function has flatlined to _hnng_.

“What, only the weight of the world? That’s it? Unimpressive.” 

“Like you can do better,” she challenges. 

He takes the bait. “Maybe I can.”

She waits, trying to quiet her fast breathing. Is he going to—? 

Footsteps crunch towards them. He pushes a little too hard with his thumb and she twitches, feeling oddly caught out. 

“Sorry,” he whispers, lifting her leg and setting it back on the ground.

“It’s fine,” she whispers back.

A beam flashes back and forth through the trees. A radio crackle, the jingle of keys. An officer on patrol, or just heading home. They wait in silence while the footsteps draw near then fade away. Ladybug wants badly to put her other foot in Adrien's lap but stays frozen in her chair, cowed by the broken spell of privacy.

“Why did I think we were about to get grounded?” he finally says. She laughs.

“Adrien Agreste, when the police ground you it’s called an arrest.”

He giggles. “Okay. But they can’t arrest a superhero.”

She wonders if she can urge him back into his train of thought before they were interrupted. “No. Neither of us has anything to worry about.” 

He doesn’t seem to pick up her insinuation. “Yeah, it’s not like we’re even doing anything wrong.”

They aren’t, but the idea that maybe they could be makes her fingers tingle and her neck hot. “Um, right,” she says.

“Now give me your hand,” he says.

“Huh?” She’s already extending it automatically. He’s not going to kiss her knuckles, is he? Her heart pounds. If _that’s_ how he tells her, she will die and then come back to life to kill him.

But he only takes her hand in both of his own and massages it.

“No, you’ve done enough, really,” she protests, then shuts up right away as he starts rubbing her palm. His hands are warm around hers, making circles on her palm, drawing up between her fingers. She loses the texture through her suit but the pressure and heat are like there’s nothing separating them. “Ohhh my god. How are you so good at this?”

“My mom used to do this for me,” he says softly.

That dampens the rosy glow filling her head. Marinette puts her free hand on top of his and squeezes, just once. “Thank you.” 

She’s never heard Adrien talk about his mom. Does he want to talk about her more? Has she not been welcoming enough, shown that she wants to listen? She’s been selfish tonight, hasn’t she? He’s probably been trying to cut in through her whining and get his actual problems off his chest, real tragedies that can’t be magicked away, and she’s too busy pitying herself to realize. He still hasn’t said anything yet. Stupid!

“I’m sorry,” she says eventually, cringing at her self-consciousness in the face of his grief.

He shrugs. “It’s nice to remember something we did together. I’m glad I can do it to help you.”

She’s grateful he sidestepped her awkwardness. “Next time I can do this for you.”

He takes both her hands in his. “I’d really like that.”

Her nerves around him have calmed a lot now that she can imagine him tripping him over his own tail, but it’s another thing entirely with him leaning in close, touching her, watching her with that unbearably earnest look she _knows_ is on his face, dark or no. The fact that Adrien’s the one wearing it unleashes every squishy, gooey feeling she thought she dried out ages ago.

_Keep it together._

“I would too,” she says, hoping he understands how much she means it.

He keeps just holding her hands. The charm bracelet she gave him presses into her wrist. She didn’t know he still wears that.

He’s quiet for so long. What is he thinking? She wishes she could see him.

“Don’t get mysterious,” she says.

“You’re one to talk.”

She huffs a laugh. She can’t be doing that good a job of masking her thoughts. She wants to curl up and go to sleep right here in the middle of the park with him. And also keep holding his hand. It’s only polite. 

“You’re tired,” he murmurs. “Do you want to head home? I’ll leave first, I won’t look which direction you go.”

“Adrien. I think it’s pretty obvious I don’t want you to leave.”

“It’s not obvious to me what you want.”

“I’m working on that,” she whispers.

He stiffens. 

She gives in to the clamor of her insistent heart and trails her thumb over the back of his hand, wishing she could feel his skin. “What is it?”

She can tell he’s gathering himself and she waits for him to speak. “Ladybug. I’ve been wanting to tell you. I don’t know if you, how you’ll...Well. I know you don’t want to hear it. But I don’t think I can bear keeping it from you any longer. I...” He takes a deep breath and opens his mouth. But nothing comes out.

She leans forward. “You don’t need to say it.” 

He leans too, clasping her hands tight. “No, I do.”

“You don’t.” She turns her hands over in his and laces their fingers together. “I mean, you can if you want. But you don’t have to say it for me to know.”

His voice is so familiar in the dark, even with no green eyes glinting. She knows exactly who she’s sitting with tonight. It’s like when she was little and learning the truth about fairies and unicorns and those monsters in the dark. Turning it over and over in her mind, comparing the evidence against what she always thought she knew, but not ready to face the music until the veil lifted and there was no yanking it back. Except now, instead of losing a little bit of magic, she’s gotten some back.

She lets go of his hands to cup his face, tracing her fingers in a swoop across his cheekbones, plotting out an invisible line. He inhales sharply. 

Even with the strength of her faith, the triumph when he slowly nods sends a thrill through her and kicks up a tangled swirl of anticipation and nerves and fear and hope in her gut. Under her hands, she feels a smile break over his face. 

“Cool,” he says.

“Cool?” she laughs.

“Very cool.” 

“That’s it? That’s all you got? I’m outta here.”

“Wait, wait,” he laughs, pushing her shoulders down. 

“I get no respect,” she says, grinning. She ruffles his hair, trying to get a rise out of him. He just slouches into it and preens.

“You made me feel better,” she tells him. “Thank you.”

“I always feel better when I talk to you.”

It’s that earnest voice again. Her mood skips to fluttering tiptoe anticipation and she has to look away from him. The moon is high in the sky. Her parents must be expecting her. 

There’s too much to say. For now, she goes with, “Yeah. So do I. And you’re right. It is very cool.”

She pictures his smirk perfectly. But when all he says is, “Ladybug,” so gently, she knows that wasn’t it at all. 

She takes his hand. “Adrien,” she says back. “I’m really, really happy you were sitting here in the dark like a weirdo.” In fact, she can’t even say how happy she is because she hasn’t yet found the edges of the feeling. “But. I probably should go. It’s late.” And she desperately needs to scream into her pillow for several hours, and figure out what to actually say to him, and how they’re moving forward from this.

“Okay.”

He doesn’t sound upset or anything, but suddenly she goes bold and foolish, and she tells him, “You know I’m going to think about you until I see you again?”

He stammers. “Me too.”

Oh god. Now she _really_ needs that pillow. “Um! Great!” She takes a breath. “Okay. Bye.”

“Bye.” 

She stands and starts across the garden, in the direction she had been going after they clipped Mr. Pigeon’s wings. After a few seconds she hears Adrien moving faintly behind her.

“Adrien,” she calls.

He turns around. “Yeah?”

She walks back and hugs him hard. His arms come up around her. Marinette indulges every last one of her romantic tendencies and lets herself think, _a perfect fit_.

“A perfect fit,” he sighs. 

Ladybug bursts out laughing.

“What? What!”

“Nothing, I swear,” she says. “I know exactly what you mean.”


End file.
